向前开 (Driving Forwards)
by speos
Summary: Half of them sinners by birth and the other half sinners by choice, they never had much of a chance to ascend in the first place, did they?


sup, fam! im back, but for saiyuki this time... im in the middle of writing grad school apps and this is all i could come up with so... please enjoy!

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They're rich now, all of them.

Without death and nothingness to welcome them, they continued to live, and live, and live, and with life comes unavoidable attachments and accumulations which have piled on and shackle them to the very earth, now.

Well. It's not like that's a new concept.

Half of them sinners by birth and the other half sinners by choice, they never had much of a chance to ascend in the first place, did they?

~0~

Sanzo only drives Rolls Royces.

He has a full garage of them, Rolls Royces, cars that purr like Hakuryuu on a warm night and drive smoothly even when jacked from zero to a hundred. Sanzo knows—Hakkai's put them to the test before.

Sanzo doesn't actually give a damn about the car specs, or cow-power, or whatever it is Goku talks about when his golden eyes shine so reverently in the reflection of the rear-view mirror. Sanzo had bullied Hakkai and Gojyo into picking the comfortable one years ago, and he's just stuck with that brand. It's too much trouble otherwise.

At least the cars have served him well. Rolls Royce has a well-deserved reputation for luxury, and the only complaint Sanzo has is the fuck-ugly bird-thing in the front that he has to wrench from the car every time he gets a new one.

("Sanzo, that's _illegal_!"

"So? Who's gonna stop me? At least I won't have to buy a new chew-toy for the monkey.")

Sanzo's cars have a turnover rate of about five years. That's one-third the average car's lifespan, and much shorter than a Rolls Royce car's lifespan _should be_ , but as if Sanzo gives a fuck. It's not like he can't afford it. He shouldn't have to keep up with the cars; cars these fucking expensive should be able to keep up with _him_.

Hakkai and Gojyo tell him that's not how it works and needle him about stabbing the passenger side with his cigarette butts, pointing out that he shouldn't drive such a nice car if he intends to treat it like a Camry, but he only takes another long drag and says, blowing out rings of smoke, that he's gotten tired of driving around in something that makes his ass sore.

~0~

Gojyo doesn't drive.

It's not that he doesn't have cars, because he does, and he has nice ones—Porches, Maseratis, Corvettes, Lamborghinis—which he shows off to pick up girls, because that hasn't changed, not over thousands of years. And he likes buying cars, too; he likes putting in the careful research, haggling with sales representatives over a couple thousand dollars that don't even matter when buying a million-dollar car, likes touching every part of the internal machinery with careful, dexterous fingers, changing the oil and carefully wiping down the metal so it shines.

(He says to Goku, who ribs him about ruining a perfectly good car with his amateur skills, that the car doesn't feel like his until he changes its oil himself.)

So he does have cars, enough to fill a garage and a half, but he doesn't drive them, just keeps them perfectly maintained as if he was.

The others don't push him on the issue.

Gojyo always was a little different.

Youkai don't really age—or at the very least, they age very slowly. Most all of them have assimilated into modern society, and those that haven't live peacefully where they know modernity cannot touch them. Hakkai is only just starting to meet silver hairs, and suffer the consequences of his collection of fake smiles through cracking laugh-lines at the corner of his eyes. Goku has finally discovered his sex drive. And Sanzo—Sanzo hasn't changed, because how could Creation fade with the coming of the future?

Gojyo always was a little different from the others.

Gojyo is dead.

He died one hundred and thirty years after they reached the West. It was long enough to figure out that Sanzo would never die, and not long enough to figure out that Gojyo would.

He never did get to bang the hot daughters Hakkai didn't have.

But as the cycle moves on, so too does life, and Gojyo is reborn again, every single time. Reincarnation isn't a smooth cycle—more akin to the passing on of a flame, than the limits of a soul—but perhaps Kannon has taken pity on them (or the bitch is just fucking with them again), because Gojyo remains mostly intact every cycle, and almost always regains his memories before he dies again.

Gojyo has black hair, this time, and almond-shaped eyes that look maroon at a very specific angle of sunlight. He's fully human. The others have forced his cut of their blood money onto him, like they always do, presenting him with a fat bank account and a garage full of cars that he only faintly remembers buying, and while he's not one to turn down a life of pleasure and leisure, it still feels like an apology for something that they haven't done—not to him.

He doesn't say so. He jokes around, pokes fun, follows his script of past behaviors and makes references to things they've done together in his previous lives, but he will _never_ tell them that his memories feel more like a fading dream than something he's done with his own two hands.

(He writes down Sha Gojyo, copies it over in foreign Chinese characters, and it feels like a grocery list. He pins it to his refrigerator door. A reminder.)

He _is_ Sha Gojyo of Sanzo's Party, but he will never be anything more than a clone.

~0~

Hakkai, perhaps most surprisingly of them all, drives only sports cars. Cars that can run zero-to-sixty in only a few seconds, rocking a powerful twelve cylinders, cars that leave blisters on the roads sure to scorch bare feet for days. Hakkai goes through wheels the way Sanzo goes through cigarette cartons.

His cars are all brands that normal people haven't ever heard of, like Koenigsegg, and Bugatti Veyron, and look like they belong to characters from _The Matrix_. Not a single car of his has horsepower under one thousand.

Gojyo, only a little uncomfortably, jokes that Hakkai's looking for death. It hits just a little too close to home, but that's the way Hakkai prefers it.

It wouldn't be a joke if it wasn't true.

Hakkai only drives at night. He rips out the driveway and heads straight for the highway, speeding, going so fast that even if the police saw him pass there would be no way they could catch him. Even he knows it's a miracle he hasn't ended up wrapped around a tree, splattered between titanium alloy and shattered bulletproof glass. He wonders if he, as a youkai, would be able to die in a car crash.

He usually returns a little before dawn, when they sky is just starting to lighten, but not enough to turn the orange-purple hues of the morning. Sanzo and Goku are usually up by then.

If he were friends with more sensitive people, they would probably do him the service of not asking.

Of course, he's not.

"If you're trying to kill yourself, just bite a bullet," Sanzo says irritably one dawn after catching Hakkai slowly pulling into his garage with a still-smoking car.

"I think you'd find that a rather pathetic death," Hakkai says, smiling.

Sanzo throws a cigarette butt at him, and Hakkai lets it hit the car. "If you think I feel any differently about what you're doing now, then your observational skills are shittier than I thought."

Hakkai knows.

Sanzo's lip curls as he snorts, turning back towards the house. "Well, you're a grown-ass bitch who can do what he wants. Do me a favor next time you go on one of your joyrides: take the monkey and kill him with you."

~0~

Goku only rides motorcycles.

He likes the big bikes, the ones that look like American football players wearing iron padding twice over and make sounds like a herd of stampeding elephants. They're the only ones that feel like they won't break immediately under his hands.

He went through a biker phase almost a hundred years ago, when he left the house to travel the world with the rest of his gang. Everyone chalked it up to belated puberty. (Hakkai actually got a little teary when Goku left, and Sanzo tried to shoot them both, which Gojyo took as a sign of impending menopause.)

It wasn't though. Belated puberty, that is. As a sentient rock, Goku figures he probably will never go through the puberty about which Hakkai forcefully educated him so many years ago. It was just—restlessness. Sure, the journey West was over, but so many other things weren't, and everyone else seemed content to just. Let it be. Like that's where their story ended.

It didn't feel right, so he left. He went West again, this time from the East coast of America to find the golden shores of California from the legends, and he went West by his own power. He liked the open top of the Jeep, so he went for the bike, and he liked the comfort of traveling with friends, so he went with a crew.

It didn't take him long to figure out it wasn't the same. His new friends were nice and all, but they seemed to be missing this… this _spark_. The little light behind their eyes that made them feel alive, made them fear death, made them love life. Made them _fight_ for it. Something just kept getting in the way. Emotions didn't feel as clear, with them.

Still, Goku liked them and he promised, so he met the Pacific Ocean with them before bidding them farewell. He rode back on his own.

On the way back, he did a lot of thinking. Contrary to what Gojyo always says, he's actually a very smart divine monkey, and he's capable of reflecting. And at the end of his journey, he came to the conclusion that he missed Sanzo. He really, really missed Sanzo, and Hakkai, and the stupid kappa-human. And that maybe, it was alright to leave some things undone. They had time.

He's still working on it.

So he came home, and his life now is more subdued than anyone could ever believe he would be content to live.

He wakes up at dawn, making such a racket that Sanzo has to wake up with him. These days, he makes his own breakfast, but it's not anything more complicated than eggs and _xifan_. Hakuryuu likes to steal from him, so he makes enough for the both of them.

Then, he goes on a walk. Their mansion is kind of in the middle of nowhere, but the mountains make it easy to have a nice walk, with ever-changing scenery so he doesn't get bored taking the same road twice. He doesn't like taking his bikes off-road; one, it could ruin the bike, and two, it would hurt the natural environment and there's enough of that already. Sometimes in the summer there's a momma bear who'll consent to a friendly spar, and that's a nice way to blow off steam.

His stomach always directs him to return at about noon, at which time Gojyo is usually awake and in the middle of making lunch. This Gojyo is unusually good at cooking, but seems to dislike talking about it and will only say that since Hakkai's become such a night owl, _someone's_ got to pick up the slack. Goku gets the feeling that that's not all there is, but has faith that someday, Gojyo will consent to tell him about _all_ his lives. Goku kind of envies Gojyo there—it's must be pretty exciting to live as more than one person.

After lunch is a quick nap, and then he's off to the village to pick up some odd jobs with Hakuryuu. Sometimes he likes to stay in and bother Sanzo, but then Sanzo'll shoot him, and Hakkai gets cranky if there are bullet holes in the wall.

At night, he and Sanzo have retained the habit of rooming together, even though Sanzo bitches about his snoring—he _doesn't_ snore—and sometimes, _sometimes_ , Sanzo will be in a good enough mood for Goku to sneak into his bed and cuddle up under Sanzo's chin. Goku's grown older, but he's still shorter than Sanzo, and their bodies fit nicely together. Sanzo still has this _thing_ about being touched, even after thousands of years, but it's a lot better now, and especially better after Goku figured out he had to be the one to initiate it. It's still Sanzo's call, every time. Goku likes it that way.

~0~

Hakuryuu spends most of his time as a car these days.

Especially after the car was actually invented, it just became weird for him to _not_ be Jeep instead of a dragon. He spends so much time as Jeep that he has a hard time remembering if he's really a white dragon who dreamt he was a green car, or a green car who dreamt he was a white dragon.

He supposes in the end it doesn't really matter. He's still Jeep, and he's still Hakuryuu. As long as his important people remember him, it doesn't matter _what_ he really is.

There are some benefits to spending so much time as Jeep. He sleeps with royalty these days, among Hakkai's sports cars and Sanzo's Rolls Royces and Gojyo's eclectic collection of luxury cars in a dry, cool garage. It feels safe there. Warm. It's like he has company, even if his company can't stroke his head or feed him food, at least it's there.

At least he's not alone.

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and thats that! drop me a note if you enjoyed!


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